Posted
by
BeauHDon Monday June 05, 2017 @06:00PM
from the more-room-for-activities dept.

New submitter StreamingEagle writes: Apple massively improves the quality of photo and video experiences, including High Dynamic Range. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) can double photo and video storage capacity, and cut the time to upload or share by half. HEVC video compression and HEIF photo compression are coming to iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra. Sean Hollister adds via CNET: "Having used HEVC quite a bit myself, I can vouch that it takes up less space. I recently transcoded roughly a terabyte of video to HEVC on my Windows PC, and saw hundreds of gigabytes of savings."

If you want one simple reason (there are plenty of other more complex ones) Youtube uses VP9 and you get better quality per bit when you can stream from them in VP9 instead of H.264. Given that Youtube is, by far, the world's largest video site that is good enough to support it right there.

Why are you talking about H.264 (AVC)? This article is about H.265 (HEVC).

There isn't a VP9 encoder out there that can match the HEVC codecs in terms of encoding speed or quality at a given bitrate or bitrate savings at a fixed quality. And what about hardware accelerated codecs (encoding and decoding) and support within the chipsets used by Apple?

And when I talk about codecs, I'm not for instance talking about x265, which is typically the most common free one used by/.ers. There are other commercial HE

If you go to Youtube, it is going to send you a video in VP9 if it can, H.264 if it can't. It doesn't use H.265 at this point.

H.256 will probably be useful in the future but RIGHT NOW VP9 is huge because of Youtube. Same deal with Netflix. They've started using VP9 for some of their stuff (and more and more as they convert it).

So I'm not hating on H.265 support, Windows 10 supports it, new Intel CPUs support it, it is a coming thing. However VP9 is something that has been deployed for some time to get bette

Why? Give us one good reason why Apple should bother with any of these.

Three good reasons:

1. VP8, VP9, and AV1 are royalty-free. Anyone can use them to encode and decode for any purpose without paying licensing fees. HEVC, in contrast, requires you to buy separate three licenses from three separate patent pools (MPEG LA [mpegla.com], HEVC Advance [hevcadvance.com], and Velos Media [velosmedia.com]). Additionally you must negotiate another license from Technicolor to use HEVC and licenses from any other company that isn't in one of the three patent pools.

2. AV1 already outperforms [bitmovin.com] HEVC in coding efficiency. The goal is to be

The company to whose service you subscribe to receive video on demand is more likely to stay in business if it doesn't have to pay a cut of its subscription revenue to codec patent pools. The amateurs who produce video and provide it for your viewing without charge are more likely to make such video available to you if they don't have to buy a licensed encoder.

I only use safari.

When you as an end user make a choice to use only Safari, you as an end user make a choice to limit the variety of video programming available to you. Instead of viewing video programming from both VP9 users and HEVC licensees, you can view only programming from HEVC licensees.

Chrome for iOS and Firefox for iOS use the same Apple WebKit browser engine as Safari for iOS, with the same set of supported and unsupported video codecs. This means that if you fire up Chrome for iOS because you have found that a video is unsupported in Safari for iOS, you will find that it is still unsupported in Chrome for iOS.

You can't make a hardware codec if the bitstream of the codec is not frozen.

So Apple's mistake is not supporting, in software only, a codec where even the software side is under delayed finalization (original due date was March 2017)? Should everybody simply redo their encodings when the bitstream is finalized?

Remember that both VP8 and VP9 succeeded in being royalty-free video formats. YouTube uses VP9 [googleblog.com] and has done for a long time. Netflix uses VP9 [medium.com]. AV1 will also succeed in being a royalty-free format.

Wrong. [appleinsider.com]. Google subsidized it. Like everything else until they get bored and move on to the next thing.

Practically no one uses HEVC hardware decode right now. Don't think that because it will come to market first they will necessarily win this one. HD-DVD players also came out before Blu-ray players and still lost in the market.

That appleinsider.com article is from March 7th 2013. As usual they put their own special spin on it. The fact is Google and the MPEG LA reached an agreement after the DoJ started to investigate the MPEG LA for stifling competition. The agreement is that Google has a patent license for VP8 and Google can sublicense it to anyone they wish to.

Thats up to apple. Only reason this is now a 'feature' is because they are releasing updated hardware with kabylake parts that support native HEVC (and VP9) decode with the intel gpu. Previously they couldnt and would have relied on whether or not there was a sufficient 3rd party gpu which only the pro's would have so there was no point in adding it. So theoretically they can, the hardware supports it, whether or not they will do it is another story

How much does it cost to take a license from all patent pools that control at least one essential HEVC patent? If your codec license budget is zero, then a royalty-free codec such as VP9 is superior to HEVC.

How much does it cost to take a license from all patent pools that control at least one essential HEVC patent? If your codec license budget is zero, then a royalty-free codec such as VP9 is superior to HEVC.

If your codec licensing budget is zero, then you better get the hell out of that business.

Unlike HEVC, in order to use VP9, Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents (VP9 has a whole patent reciprocity agreement - much like the GPLv3). So if you have no patents of your own, VP9 sounds like a great deal.

That makes VP9 a non-starter for a lot of organizations, and it seems that Apple is among them.

VP9 has a big user base because it's promoted by an industry giant, but it is not an international standard, but a format controlled by a

The issue isn't patents, the issue is the licensing. Baseline JPEG has always contained patented technology but it was licensed under royalty-free terms so everyone was free to use JPEG. Similarly, VP9 contains patented technology which is licensed under royalty-free terms and everyone is free to use it.

This is wholly unlike HEVC. To use HEVC you must buy three separate licenses from three separate patent pools (MPEG LA [mpegla.com], HEVC Advance [hevcadvance.com], and Velos Media [velosmedia.com]) and then negotiate additional licenses from companies li

If Apple is allowed to use Google's essential patents only on condition that Apple doesn't use Apple's essential patents against Google or other users of VP9, then Apple's essential patents are in effect licensed to Google and other users of VP9, even if no formal written instrument has been signed.

Unlike HEVC, in order to use VP9, Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents (VP9 has a whole patent reciprocity agreement - much like the GPLv3).

Free use of all patents owned by Apple Inc. and its subsidiaries, or only of those patents essential to VP9? The reciprocity provision of the additional patent grant for VP8 and VP9 [webmproject.org] appears to apply only to patents related to those codecs.

VP9 has a big user base because it's promoted by an industry giant, but it is not an international standard

What organizations qualify to set "an international standard"? If IETF counts, then VP8 is RFC 6386 [ietf.org], and standardization of VP9 is ongoing [webmproject.org].

JPEG-2000 is slow to decode. There exists a somewhat faster algorithm but it is patent-encumbered and proprietary.

The only place where JPEG-2000 has got widespread adoption is in digital cinema (Motion JPEG-2000) and that requires special-purpose hardware where as H.264 at the same quality could be decoded in software on a commodity PC.

VLC has no problem st all downloading (or streaming) using SMB, FTP, Plex, and DNLA. If you want, you can even go the slow route and download them using a USB cable. I connect VLC to my MythTV box all the time, transfer files, and play them for my kids on a road trip. VLC even lets me adjust the audio synchronization to account for the delay from Bluetooth and my car's audio system.

Obviously, you're not interested in the streaming part, but you can absolutely download to the phone's flash memory for offline use.

In fact, you can Transfer files VLC directly using SMB, FTP, Plex or DNLA. Alternatively, you can use the "send to" function to have one iOS app (such as an FTP/SFTP client, Dropbox, or even email) into VLC.

The VLC devs did a pretty good job on iOS; they even made a library so other programs can embed VLC into their apps. You can even do

I disagree; while you can't embed <video> - and have the video play in a useless postage-stamp-sized video in the web browser, you can have the web browser open an external app to play the media full screen -- which is exactly what happens for YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, and VLC.

I really don't see the applicability when it's the same behavior that you see for <video> tags on any other OS/browser.

The bottom line is that HEVC (h.265) is the ISO standard, and is one of the lowest common denomi

you can have the web browser open an external app to play the media full screen

Provided that said external app supports the media. Many sites offering HTML5 video use Media Source Extensions (MSE) [wikipedia.org] so that the client has finer control of buffering and can deter receiving the body of the video before having received the message from the video's sponsor. But Wikipedia's article about MSE mentions nothing about VLC, nor does its article about VLC [wikipedia.org] mention MSE.

Or are you claiming that MSE ought not be used, that VLC media player by itself handles buffering well and that the operator of a si

It isn't much of a thing. The version distributed via the Apple App Store doesn't have any of the GPL'd bits, which includes things like the DVD menu support. You use dvdbackup to take a CSS-free copy of a DVD and play it fine on any version of VLC except the iOS one.

Recompressing will unavoidably worsen image quality, and of course the quoted bit doesn't go into any detail. I could take a DVD, MPEG2, and "transcode" it to another MPEG2 and make it 80% smaller! It'll look crap, mind you...

Granted this is 100% true, but h.265 (or HEVC) can basically encode twice the bit rate at the same file size compared to h.264. Accordingly, transcoding h.264 into h.265 at 1.5 the bit rate is essentially lossless in terms of visual quality, but the final file will be approximately 75% the original size.

If someone has a bunch of high bit-rate h.264 (aka not stuff downloaded off the web which tends to be really highly compressed anyway), I can see someone wanting to save space and reencode it, especially if

I think the claim was intended to relate to a transcode from high-bitrate source material to a lower-bitrate stream intended for distribution through the Internet. Settings for leading AVC and HEVC encoders that produce similar levels of visible distortion will produce a significantly lower bitrate with HEVC than with AVC.

XVID came about from an MS codec, and DivX;) got its start from, well, look at the name.They gradually got better over time, but the best codecs available to mere mortals were the $$$ ones for years and years.

LAME was ass and was developed against the official Fraunhofer MP3 encoder, and it took years to reach parity. When it finally did, people were wondering if MP3Pro was going to make LAME irrelevant again.

With MP4, we had Nero's aacenc to deal with. Everyone was passing it out because it was THE code

The industry is already using it. While netflix may have their name on AV1, they are already using HEVC for all of their 4k content. So is every other big player in the content industry, if its 4k, its hevc at this point. So I wouldnt say the industry isnt biting, they are using whats currently available and feasible to get to market

It depends on the devices they plan to be on. If they want to have any sort of compatibility with existing 4k capable devices they will have to maintain their hevc encoded library. Since those devices wont magically gain an AV1 decoder its either they completely ditch support for any current 4k capable device, or they continue encoding for them

How many of you posting that HEVC patent licensing is a mess are actually in need of an HEVC patent license? I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say... none of you. Apple has just added HEVC support to iOS and MacOS, retroactively upgrading hundreds of millions of devices. Obviously, Apple can handle their IP licensing adequately, and so anyone using HEVC on a supported device doesn't have to worry about taking a patent license, as the device itself is licensed, and so an app developer, service provi

https://developer.apple.com/li... [apple.com]
Media and Web
New in tvOS 11.0 - Support for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC).
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a new standard for video encoding that offers substantially better compression than H.264 at the same level of visual quality.
Use AV Foundation to playback movies containing HEVC encoded tracks, and to export videos.
VideoToolbox clients can encode and decode HEVC video bitstreams.
New in tvOS 11.0 - Support for High Effi

Apple is using the same A8 chip in Apple TV as they use in iPhones.
This chip has a built-in hardware HEVC decoder (and encoder). http://appleinsider.com/articl... [appleinsider.com] It's not practical from a performance perspective to decode 4K HEVC in software. It's possible with an optimized HEVC decoder to handle 1080P30 on a quad-core ARM processor, but your chip will get hot, and in a mobile device your battery will be drained quickly.
Apple is EXTREMELY unlikely to ever support VP9 or AV1. HEVC makes VP9 obsolete

The A8 has a fixed function HEVC decoder and encoder, just as the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of SOCs does (starting with the 801), the Samsung Exynos, and most other mobile SOCs. Apple didn't license Ittiam's decoder.

This article compares Apple's A8 chip with a Qualcomm Snapdragon, saying "In terms of data management, both Qualcomm and Apple support H.265 video encoding and decoding, also referred to HEVC or high efficiency video coding."
I'm done arguing with an Anonymous Coward. Apple makes A8 chips for themselves only, and they don't feel the need to list detailed specs of their custom SOC like other SOC vendors (Qualcomm, Mediatek, etc.) do. Obviously you don't work in this field. You can speculate that Apple is